Obama's Comfort Zone Is Outside the DC Beltway

Monday

Feb 4, 2013 at 3:22 PM

WASHINGTON | A frenzied crowd waved signs from the November election and chanted, “Si, se puede,” when President Barack Obama took the stage at a Las Vegas high school. Someone yelled, “I love you,” and the president gave a finger-point and his standard: “Love ya back.”

WASHINGTON | A frenzied crowd waved signs from the November election and chanted, “Si, se puede,” when President Barack Obama took the stage at a Las Vegas high school. Someone yelled, “I love you,” and the president gave a finger-point and his standard: “Love ya back.”Re-elected and re-inaugurated, Obama is going back to one place he knows he can succeed - the campaign trail.Last week, it was Nevada for immigration reform. This week, he’s off to Minneapolis to talk about gun control. The next week, he’ll make his State of the Union address, followed by yet another trip out of Washington.After the audience cheered Obama’s immigration plan in the Del Sol High School gym, a top political adviser explained the thinking on his return to the stump. “Show me the Republican who could do that right now,” said the official, who asked not to be identified to talk about White House discussions. “The president’s voice is one of the best tools we have.”During a second term, presidents often head off on a tour of the country after their State of the Union assessment, seizing the high mark of their political capital to press their agenda. The clock is ticking with less than two years, maybe only months, before lame-duck status sidelines the chief executive.Obama isn’t waiting. He’s running opinion leaders through the White House at a daily clip to build support for immigration reform and gun control, as well as his economic vision. And, more than any other president, he’s using his campaign’s grass-roots network to amplify his message in social media and e-mail in-boxes.All of this is instead of wading into the weeds with Congress. While White House aides are monitoring lawmakers who are crafting legislation, Obama was surprisingly blunt last week about his role. “What I’m going to do is allow the Senate to work on these details,” he told Univision when asked about an aspect not addressed in his immigration blueprint.That outside posture has Republicans repeating their four-year-old refrain about the president: He’s good at talk, but stumbles when it comes to action.“He’s always been very comfortable in the campaign mode part of this - the speeches making direct appeals to the American public where he wants to see the policy go,” said GOP strategist Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney. “I think he’s always been much more comfortable with the pageantry of politics than the practice of building legislative coalitions.”It’s unclear whether any president could build a coalition in such a sharply split Congress. But as Obama reads his first term, the best way to get anything done on Capitol Hill is to win over the crowds first.Fresh off his first inauguration, Obama spent his political capital diving into health care reform, a bruising effort that took more than a year. His efforts to negotiate a far-reaching budget deal with the House speaker yielded nothing. But when he took to the road, he was able to win an extension of the payroll tax break and lower interest rates on federal student loans.“They’re making up for a major error of the first term, that he didn’t use the bully pulpit as effectively to set the national debate,” said Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University. “He let a lot of the health care debate take place in Congress, so you had Congress setting the terms.“In the second term, if he’s going to get anything done, he has to get the public behind him,” Lichtman continued. “Congress operates on fear and greed. The only way you get Congress to work with him is if they believe he has a big public movement behind him.”The president’s approval ratings have risen in the four months since his re-election, But it’s too soon to see whether he’s boosted support for his signature issues. Obama has seized on issues that already have solid levels of public support.Whether a president has the power to generate a tide of public sentiment remains a matter of debate among political scientists and historians. Did President Ronald Reagan bring about a revolution in American politics, for instance, or was he the beneficiary of one already under way?George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar and political scientist at Texas A&M University, studied hundreds of polls on presidents and concluded that even the most accomplished orators usually failed to win public support for their top initiatives.Despite Reagan’s opposition to spending on social programs, for instance, public support for them rose during his tenure. Still, Reagan persuaded Democrats to pass his bills to cut taxes in 1981 and 1986, which some see as clear evidence that his skillful public diplomacy had an effect on his negotiations with Congress.“Ronald Reagan was the great communicator because he was very powerful in selling ideas that people thought were crazy,” Lichtman said. “Who would have thought an across-the-board tax cut would be adopted when it was? It was the persuasiveness of Ronald Reagan, talking about getting the government off your back.”With Obama, though, his opponents do not seem worried about the effect of his words, however eloquently delivered.“I think that his biggest problem is that every time he speaks it doesn’t have any real impact on Republicans,” said John Feehery, a GOP strategist and former legislative aide. “They almost ignore him. He speaks in such a way it actually revs up the Republican base to be more opposed to him, especially in red districts and red states.”Still, some influential Republicans want to cut a deal on immigration policy, swayed not by Obama’s rhetoric but by the realization that the party’s return to the White House would require more Latino support.In the battle to win public opinion, Obama has an enormous advantage, beyond the bully pulpit of the White House. He is the main spokesman for his causes. Republicans have no such single voice, but a multitude of prominent, and in some cases divisive, figures, such as Wayne LaPierre, the fiery executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.But Obama’s primacy comes at a price. Selling three major agenda items at once is no small task. Advisors to the president are trying to keep the messages from muddling together.As they try to fire up campaign supporters, for instance, they are aiming messages on different issues at the supporters likely to care the most.They also think the president’s broader message - that Americans want the two political parties to work together to solve the nation’s problems - has broad appeal.Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, tried to explain recently how this approach will work: “I think they would welcome a circumstance in which Washington was more collaborative and cooperative and productive, where we were able to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform, even as we deal with our fiscal challenges, where we were able to address the horrible scourge of gun violence in this country by moving on proposals that are very common-sense and not one of which would take away a gun from a single law-abiding American.”That’s a lot to say in one sentence.